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Sunday, July 20, 2014

Waterboarding poor Detroit

Few people speak with the moral authority of a comic book hero so naturally when Mark Ruffalo, who has played a comic book hero in the movies, issued a call for thousands to turnout to protest 300 people showed up. Hell, probably more than 300 people in Detroit still celebrate Fathers Day!

Anyway if you missed the national call to come to Detroit I'll try to catch you up on the human rights crisis in Detroit. Activist in Detroit have cried all the way to the United Nations arguing that access to drinking water is a human right. The counter argument is that if nobody pays his water bill Detroit can't have a water department.
To their credit some community leaders have tried to establish a regional water authority that would that would shift the burden of paying individual water bills to rate payers in adjacent counties thus freeing up much needed cash to buy comic books and view super hero movies but the outlying counties have been reluctant to participate probably due to excessive greed.
Currently there are about 92,000 households "at risk" of shutoff meaning that they have not paid their water bill in at least 2 months or that they owe more than $150. It's tantamount to the other scourge of the urban masses, "food insecurity".
So who is to blame for this crisis? Bank of America of and the Tea Party of course. It's tricky to understand why but they clear it all that up over at Truth-Out. The gist of it is that Detroit was not really bankrupt but was a victim of a "hostile corporate takeover" by Governor Rick Snyder and the Tea Party controlled state legislature at the behest of Wall Street bankers and the 1%. The motive? It's the dreaded "G" word, GENTRIFICATION! Yes, for some queer reason the 1% wants to turn Detroit into a playground for the rich and famous except for Ruffalo of course who will be on the road bemoaning the practice of fracking and the wealth that it creates.
Will no one help? Will the oppressed poor of Detroit be forced to pay their water bills? Not if Elizabeth Warren can help it. She evidently has a scheme to tax Wall Street and deliver the goods to the deserving poor in Detroit. Either that or the saintly Sandinista Senator from Massachusetts who fancies herself as a cross between Joan of Arc and Pocahontas is testing Detroit's water for a run at her party's presidential nomination.

2 comments:

I've been following this on WJR: Beckmann cited this article by Nolan Finley at the Detroit NEws that somehow those same people receiving public assistance find a way to pay their cable and cell phone bills.

Finley:

"Fully half of the water customers in Detroit don’t pay their bills. Advocates of free water for all blame the city’s 38 percent poverty rate for the high level of delinquency.

But nearly all of those with incomes below the poverty line receive public assistance. That’s money provided by their fellow citizens to help them pay for their basic needs — food, water, clothing, shelter.

And yet barely 50 percent of Detroiters pay their water bill. Meanwhile, up to two-thirds of city residents pay to keep their cable or satellite television service current. And 72 percent do the same to maintain their cellphones."

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140717/OPINION01/307170005#ixzz383cFbJM3